A Review of Christopher Morash’s Writing the Irish Famine

Patrick O'Sullivan, Visiting Scholar, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University

Thanks to the author for sharing this review, which originally appeared in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28 (2001): 164-65, — George P. Landow.

"It is an appalling picture, that which springs up to
memory," writes Canon Sheehan of the Irish Famine in
his 1905 Glenanaar. "Gaunt spectres move here and
there, looking at one another out of hollow eyes of
despair and gloom. Ghosts walk the land."
Patrick Sheehan was born in 1852. What of the Irish
Famine could spring to his memory? The simple answer
must be that Sheehan is remembering other literary
representations of the Famine.

I first contacted Christopher Morash about the theme of
literary representations of the Irish Famine in the early
1990S — when I was planning The Meaning of the
Famine, the problematic last volume of my series The
Irish World Wide. Morash kindly sent me a copy of
Writing the Irish Famine in typescript, and he wrote for
my series a chapter based on it. My opening paragraph
above is taken from that chapter — a chapter which I
have long thought should act as an introduction to the
methods and the thought of the full-length volume. I felt
then that a problem had been identified and solved with
the publication of Writing the Irish Famine in 1995.
Perhaps it is time to think again about this scholarly gift
that Morash has given us — for Morash expects a
readership that understands the problem and is willing to
work at understanding his solutions.

It is a truism within the study of Irish literature that the
writers within the agreed "canon" all but ignore the Irish
Famine. The disguised demons in Yeats' play The
Countess Cathleen speak the language of "political
economy" turned into verse. One harangue by the
Citizen in James Joyce's Ulysses is, like Patrick Sheehan's memory, a conflation of earlier Famine texts: "Even the
grand Turk sent us his piastres..." (This reference was
clarified by Christine Kinealy's chapter on charity and
philanthropy in The Meaning of the Irish Famine). But,
really, you are hunting for instances. In Writing the
Irish Famine Morash's fine scholarship demonstrates
ways of reading, understanding and valuing what is
called "minor literature" — with generous
acknowledgement to David Lloyd's Nationalism and Minor
Literature (1987).

The seven chapters of Morash's book fall into three
broad sections: Progress, Apocalypse, and Claiming the
Dead. Morash applies the resources and methods of
newer literary criticisms to a genuine problem within
Irish historiography and the study of Irish literature —
the strange patterns, underlying assumptions, and
underlying theologies ("progress," "national sin") within
writing about the Irish Famine. The works Morash helps
us to read include literary texts by familiar and unfamiliar
writers such as Carleton, Trollope, Mangan, John Mitchel,
Aubrey de Vere and Samuel Ferguson — but he also goes
further to reveal how such texts interact with histories,
sermons, and, in an important chapter on Malthus, with
economic treatises.

The book is a difficult but exciting "litcrit" read. For
example, when Barthes talks about an intertextual
archive which is "anonymous, untraceable, and
nevertheless already read" (5); when Greenblatt
acknowledges "the desire to speak with the dead" (7); when
Ricoeur speaks of "the interweaving of history and
fiction" (12); when Foucault talks about "the great
confinement" (65); when Ricoeur says that victimisation
"reveals the scandal of every theodicy of history" (141);
when Benjamin talks about "even the dead" not being
safe (153); when Jonathan Culler quotes George Eliot on
"the present causes of past effects" (166); when
Benjamin talks about remembrance salvaging the future
from "homogenous, empty time" (180); when de Man, on
Epitaphs, suggests that by "making the dead speak ...
the living are struck dumb" (182); when Todorov talks
about genres being "revelatory" of ideology (185); and
when Lyotard speaks of an aesthetic "which denies itself
the solace of good forms" (186), they might well be
talking about "writing the Irish Famine." In other words,
Morash clarifies themes and problems within current
literary criticism by using that criticism's techniques to
clarity the problematic literary and historiographic legacy
of the Famine.

Part of the difficulty of reading — or teaching —
Morash's book is that his arguments are close, hard and
subtle. His own text follows the movement of thought in
the texts under study — which were written in times of
crisis and despair. Or in times of hard complacency.
Perhaps another fine and difficult book to be put alongside Morash's is Peter Gray's Famine, Land and Politics
(1999). Working within the traditions of British political
history, Gray reads another series of difficult texts, the
British political record, and finds that these texts, while
seeming to offer economic theory, in fact offer
theology. Thus Gray is able to cite Morash's Writing the
Irish Famine, on the notion of "progress," in Trollope's
novels — Gray is then free to study Trollope's six
Examiner letters and their resolute defence of British
Government policy in "the circumstances ordained by
Providence."

Morash has grounded our understanding of those
contradictory "historical metanarratives," progress,
apocalypse, and their unstable reconciliation in a
Protestant theology of "national sin." Individuals who
sin will meet retribution in the next life, but the sins of
nations must be punished in the present world (91). It is
a fearsome thing about theology that it can be at the
same time entirely logical and quite mad. But which
nation is the sinner, and which is sinned against? Having
acknowledged the exegesis of Revelations by Charles
Walmesley, which was popularised as the prophecies of
"Pastorini" and the aisling tradition, Morash then shows
nationalist and/or Catholic poets hijacking a theology
which offered no clear route forward for orthodox bourgeois nationalism and which was at odds with orthodox
Catholicism.

Through Morash's skilful use of different kinds of
knowledge, he demonstrates these processes at work in
individual poems and individual lives. He guides us
through the works of Mangan and acknowledges Lloyd.
He introduces the work of John Frazer, a Protestant
nationalist, a cabinet-maker and contemporary of
Mangan. Frazer's apocalyptic 1848 poem "The Three
Angels" offers grim "angels" of pestilence, war and
famine and is set alongside Yeats' cheerful demons. But
then Frazer takes us on to consider emigration, and
diaspora — for a year later he is writing "The Artisan's
Apology for Emigrating": "No flame-armed angel of GOD
we obey ... dark spectres of death compel us away...."
And then there is the Morash touch — the precise
placing of the individual understanding and experience
within theory. "'History,' observes Fredric jameson, 'is
what hurts...'" [125).

The book's last full chapter is entitled "William Carleton
and the End of Writing." Because of Morash's methodology, I find it intriguing that the book should end with a careful reading of Carleton. Morash explores Carleton and the idea of progress, "authentic" Country Life, ownership of the peasantry "endowed by the Famine with an
almost talismanic importance" (157) and explains the
narrative collapse in The Squanders of Castle Squander.

The "Conclusion: Claiming the Dead" begins: "William
Carleton's 'Far Gurtha' can stand as an icon for the whole
body of nineteenth-century Famine literature, the haunt'
ing projection of the absent Famine dead...." And near
the end, it says, "Castle Squander can be read as an
unwitting, unwilling postmodern text beyond the control
of formal closure in its struggle to present the unpresentable...."

Throughout the Irish Diaspora, there were, from the
anniversary years 1995 onwards, efforts made to erect
monuments to the dead of the Irish Famine, projects
which had perhaps to do with bringing into the present
the absent Famine dead. Such examples that automatically come to mind are those in Grosse lie, Boston,
Liverpool, Sydney and New York. We can respect those
monuments, and respect those efforts — but we can
also wish that some of that effort had gone into a reading of Christopher Morash's Writing the Irish Famine.